Exploitation in southeast Asia

The area we cover is insular Southeast Asia, or Melanesia, comprising the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. The countries of mainland Southeast Asia are excluded, as they contain little tropical rain forest. Our own research experience leads us to focus mainly on Indonesia.

We consider three categories of exploitation: logging, rattan collection, and shifting cultivation. All are economically important in Southeast Asia and all have had increasingly widespread and deleterious effects in the last few decades. We first describe an example of "traditional" (that is, non-mechanized) logging, from the remote Apo Kayan region of the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. Timber cutting in the Apo Kayan is still largely for local use, and employs means that must have been more widespread in Borneo in pre-industrial times. It is far less environmentally destructive than modern commercial logging in lowland dipterocarp forests, which is a subject we also consider. We then turn to rattan collection, drawing especially on the work of Dransfield, who has considered the relation of rattan biology to methods of management and conservation. The last section is a discussion of some aspects of shifting cultivation. (author)